How a lazy eater went vegan

I went veg­e­tar­ian in col­lege, and had wanted to go ve­gan ever since I read Ju­lia Galef’s ar­ti­cle on why eat­ing eggs may kill more an­i­mals than eat­ing meat. But I was ner­vous about the po­ten­tial health con­se­quences of go­ing ve­gan, and a lot of the guides to go­ing ve­gan made it sound like a ridicu­lous amount of work. Some guides seemed to as­sume you loved spend­ing lots of time cook­ing. Or they’d recom­mend other things I just couldn’t see my­self do­ing, like eat­ing 6 cups of leafy greens per day for cal­cium. (6 cups may not sound like a lot, un­til you go to the gro­cery story and re­al­ize the big bags they sell there are only 2.5 cups. Try to imag­ine your­self eat­ing two or more of those bags ev­ery day.)

Even­tu­ally, though, I worked out a diet plan that would be both healthy and easy to fol­low. Cook­ing effort is min­i­mal; ev­ery­thing can be made with a microwave and rice cooker. I don’t claim the fol­low­ing diet is nu­tri­tion­ally op­ti­mal a la Soylent or MealSquares, but I do think it’s prob­a­bly healthier than the diet of the av­er­age Amer­i­can om­nivore:

Plan on get­ting most of your calories and pro­tein from a mix of ce­re­als (bread, corn, rice, etc.) and legumes (beans, lentils, peanuts, soy, etc.)

Keep fruit and veg­eta­bles around to snack on. A hand­ful of baby car­rots per day will take care of all your vi­tamin A needs.

Ad­ding a mod­er­ate amount of iodized salt to your meals is prob­a­bly good idea, for both nu­tri­tion and taste.

There are just two nu­tri­ents that you’ll re­ally need to get from sup­ple­ments (or foods for­tified with them): cal­cium and vi­tamin B12.

I also take a vi­tamin D3 + K2 sup­ple­ment, but that has more to do with not get­ting much sun than with ve­g­anism.

So that your diet isn’t com­pletely bor­ing, keep an eye out for good ve­gan and ve­gan-friendly gro­cery stores and restau­rants. Chipo­tle and Trader Joe’s are two ex­am­ples of good ve­gan-friendly na­tional chains.

Look­ing over these bul­let points, part of me doesn’t be­lieve it’s re­ally that sim­ple… but it’s what I’m do­ing, and I have no ma­jor wor­ries about my health or abil­ity to be happy with this diet over the long haul. You should be aware that iron is an is­sue for some peo­ple, but most peo­ple don’t have to worry about it. Also, there may be benefits from mak­ing an effort to con­sume cre­a­tine and omega-3 fatty acids, but if wor­ry­ing about them seems like too much of a has­sle, you’ll prob­a­bly be fine.

Since many in the Bay Area effec­tive al­tru­ist com­mu­nity are into low-carb diet­ing for weight-loss pur­poses, I should ad­dress that. The most promi­nent low-carb ad­vo­cates, like Gary Taubes and the late Robert Atk­ins, have made claims that sim­ply have no sci­en­tific ba­sis. For ex­am­ple, both have claimed that peo­ple can eat un­limited amounts of fatty foods and not gain weight, be­cause only carbs cause weight gain. I’ve never heard Taubes give a co­her­ent ac­count of how this is sup­posed to be true; Atk­ins claimed it was due to ex­cess calories be­ing ex­creted in the urine as ke­tones, but urine ke­tone lev­els are too small for this to be pos­si­ble.

Some stud­ies com­par­ing low-carb diets to other diets have found es­sen­tially no differ­ence in terms of weight-loss, while oth­ers have found mod­est benefits for low-carb diets over low-fat diets. Based on my own per­sonal ex­pe­rience, and read­ing Yoni Freed­hoff’s book The Diet Fix, I sus­pect any benefits of low-carb diets come from the fact that they also tend to be high-pro­tein. I’ve found that eat­ing high-pro­tein plant foods like soy and lentils works won­ders in terms of my abil­ity to eat in mod­er­a­tion with­out feel­ing hun­gry. For the past cou­ple of weeks, I’ve ac­tu­ally been mak­ing a con­scious effort to eat more calories, mostly to avoid hav­ing to buy new pants again.

A fi­nal point to note is that there may be an eth­i­cal case for eat­ing bi­valves. I haven’t tried this yet, mainly out of laz­i­ness (see the ti­tle of this post). How­ever, it’s some­thing I may do in the fu­ture.

Sev­eral com­ments raised the con­cern of un­known health is­sues with a veg/​n diet. While I think un­knowns are ex­cep­tion­ally im­por­tant in nu­tri­tion given the low-qual­ity ev­i­dence that ex­ists over­all in the field, I don’t think that’s a strong ar­gu­ment against veg/​nism be­cause so many veg/​ns have already lived and been as healthy, if not healthier, than non veg/​ns. And we can say the un­knowns cut both ways here, both with un­known benefits and un­known draw­backs to veg/​nism.

In gen­eral, I think we should have added skep­ti­cism for ar­gu­ments against veg*nism due to the high self-serv­ing bias we have to con­tinue our cur­rent diets.

we should have added skep­ti­cism for ar­gu­ments against veg*nism due to the high self-serv­ing bias we have to con­tinue our cur­rent diets.

And we should have added skep­ti­cism for health-based ar­gu­ments for veg­e­tar­i­anism that are made by peo­ple who are veg­e­tar­i­ans for non-health rea­sons, as it would be ex­tremely con­ve­nient if mak­ing a mas­sive dietary change for non-health rea­sons turned out to have no ma­jor health is­sues.

I don’t see it as a mas­sive dietary change. If any­thing, it’s closer to our his­tor­i­cal diet (which, AFAIK, gen­er­ally con­sisted of lots of plants with lit­tle an­i­mal prod­ucts). Also, I don’t ex­pect most dietary changes of a similar scale to go­ing veg/​n (say, cut­ting out grains or cut­ting out fruits) to have ma­jor health is­sues. So it’s not “ex­tremely con­ve­nient” to me.

Also, it might even be ex­tremely con­ve­nient if mak­ing a mas­sive dietary change for non-health rea­sons turned out to have no ma­jor health benefits!

(I apol­o­gize in ad­vance for a downer of a com­ment, es­pe­cially for the parts that are poorly ar­gued.)

In gen­eral, I think the risk of im­por­tant but un­known nu­tri­ent defi­cien­cies from cut­ting out a whole class of foods is prob­a­bly much more im­por­tant than the an­i­mal welfare benefits if you are spend­ing much of your life work­ing on good pro­jects. This is a con­cern with veg­e­tar­i­anism, but it seems much more se­vere for ve­g­anism.

I haven’t looked into the liter­a­ture in cre­a­tine in any depth (largely be­cause my diet is long on cre­a­tine), but the ev­i­dence for ma­te­rial cog­ni­tive effects looks weighty enough that I would want to be care­ful be­fore con­sid­er­ing re­turn­ing to a low-cre­a­tine veg­e­tar­ian diet. It seems like this should prob­a­bly get more weight, un­less ev­ery­one else knows some­thing I don’t.

Based on rough es­ti­mates it seems like be­ing a ve­gan is not go­ing to be worth it on con­se­quen­tial­ist grounds, at least for those who would e.g. be will­ing to pay an ad­di­tional fac­tor of 2 pre­mium to eat meat pe­ri­od­i­cally. For such peo­ple the ques­tion is: if rais­ing an an­i­mal gen­er­ates $X of eco­nomic value, can you gen­er­ate a welfare offset for a small mul­ti­ple of $X? It would be quite sur­pris­ing to me if this weren’t pos­si­ble (e.g. just sub­si­diz­ing the cre­ation of a small num­ber of more hu­manely raised sub­sti­tutes should work, which I would guess is or­ders of mag­ni­tude less effec­tive than re­al­is­tic ap­proaches). I haven’t thought about this at too much length, largely be­cause I think that the effects on an­i­mal welfare to­day are not too im­por­tant ei­ther on con­trac­tar­ian grounds nor on util­i­tar­ian grounds (since they seem to have a min­i­mal long-term im­pact, and the di­rect im­pacts are small com­pared to long-term con­sid­er­a­tions). But I do think that given the ba­sic eco­nomic logic the bur­den of ar­gu­ment rests with the veg­e­tar­ian ad­vo­cate.

If it’s a bad idea on con­se­quen­tial­ist grounds, I’m not con­vinced it’s a use­ful sig­nal­ing ex­er­cise. Alter­na­tives like “cut out the worst offen­ders,” “re­duce con­sump­tion by 90%,” and “buy hu­manely pro­duced prod­ucts” seem much bet­ter both on con­se­quen­tial­ist grounds and (con­se­quently) also sig­nal­ing grounds.

I sec­ond the recom­men­da­tions for pow­ersmooth­ies el­se­where (though I drink mine with milk, which I find more deli­cious and seems prob­a­bly bet­ter health-wise).

Crea­tine is cheap and read­ily available as a sup­ple­ment. Ul­ti­mately, foods are made up of chem­i­cal build­ing blocks, and it seems ar­bi­trary to con­sider the di­vi­sion “an­i­mal/​non-an­i­mal” as es­pe­cially nu­tri­tion­ally salient.

Also, “car­ing about lesser minds” is a good meme to pro­mote, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing FAI, CEV etc.

it seems ar­bi­trary to con­sider the di­vi­sion “an­i­mal/​non-an­i­mal” as es­pe­cially nu­tri­tion­ally salient.

I don’t think this is ac­tu­ally ar­bi­trary. Hu­mans are an­i­mals, not plants. As such, it seems prima fa­cie plau­si­ble that an­i­mals would con­tain the nu­tri­ents we need, as they are pre­sum­ably largely the same nu­tri­ents the an­i­mals need. Hu­mans did not evolve to only eat plants though, so it’s plau­si­ble that there are some nu­tri­ents that we need that are both ab­sent in plants and that we are un­able to me­tab­o­lize from plants.

Also, “car­ing about lesser minds” is a good meme to pro­mote, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing FAI, CEV etc.

The point about CEV is that it is ex­trap­o­lated—if you have a good ar­gu­ment for veg­e­tar­i­anism, CEV would take that ar­gu­ment into ac­count, whether or not you ac­tu­ally made the ar­gu­ment to any­one. So there’s no need to evan­ge­lize now.

Hu­mans are an­i­mals, not plants. As such, it seems prima fa­cie plau­si­ble that an­i­mals would con­tain the nu­tri­ents we need, as they are pre­sum­ably largely the same nu­tri­ents the an­i­mals need.

Hold­ing calories con­stant, the foods rich­est in micronu­tri­ents are plants, not an­i­mals.

I agree that cre­a­tine is easy to get, but given that I ob­ject to a de­scrip­tion of how to be a veg­e­tar­ian that says “if it’s too much trou­ble don’t bother.”

An­i­mals and non-an­i­mals are quite differ­ent nu­tri­tion­ally, and it seems quite likely that there are some things you need to sup­ple­ment as a ve­gan, or at least that you need to be quite care­ful about.

The ques­tion of whether you can get by with­out meat at all then seems quite similar to the ques­tion of whether you can get by with­out any fruits or veg­eta­bles if you take all of the rele­vant nu­tri­ents via sup­ple­men­ta­tion, for which the con­sen­sus ap­pears to be “maybe, but don’t count on it given our limited un­der­stand­ing of nu­tri­tion.” Do you see a rele­vant dis­anal­ogy (other than scope, which may be some­what larger for veg­gies than meat)?

The ques­tion of whether you can get by with­out meat at all then seems quite similar to the ques­tion of whether you can get by with­out any fruits or veg­eta­bles… Do you see a rele­vant dis­anal­ogy?

Ac­cord­ing to Wikipe­dia, the na­tional dieti­ti­ans’ as­so­ci­a­tions of the USA, Canada, and Aus­tralia claim that well-planned ve­gan diets are nu­tri­tion­ally ad­e­quate for ev­ery­one, while the Ger­man So­ciety for Nutri­tion warns against it, es­pe­cially for chil­dren, the el­derly, and the preg­nant. On bal­ance, this is much more pos­i­tive than I imag­ine their opinions would be on a car­nivorous + sup­ple­men­ta­tion diet.

There are sur­veys about this – for ex­am­ple U.S. News & World Re­port’s’s an­nual sur­vey of dieti­ti­ans. Ve­gan diets are always rated as much more health­ful than meat heavy diets like Pa­leo, and pre­sum­ably pa­leo in turn is bet­ter than “meat + sup­ple­ments”.

So tran­si­tively, it seems like ex­perts do per­ceive a rele­vant dis­anal­ogy.

I’d say B12 is the only re­ally crit­i­cal sup­ple­ment needed as a ve­gan (and even then, lots of plant milks are for­tified with it, so it’s quite hard to avoid). To be on the safe side, you can take a 1 a day sup­ple­ment tai­lored for ve­g­ans, like: https://​www.ve­g­anso­ciety.com/​shop/​sup­ple­ments/​veg1-or­ange-90s Although I’ve re­cently no­ticed that I’ve gone nearly a year with­out this (was go­ing to try a soylent recipe in­stead, and didn’t, and for­got to re­stock!), and have not suffered any ill effects. In ac­tual fact, I’ve had a pretty rub­bish diet for large parts of the last year (mar­mite sand­wiches, crisps, ce­real) and have been fine. Maybe I’m push­ing my luck though!

If you look at all the foods eaten in the world, the vast ma­jor­ity are of plant ori­gin, so meat is nar­row in scope from that view (it just seems cen­tral from a mod­ern-day Western per­spec­tive); per­haps the scope is large enough for the anal­ogy not to hold with fruits and veg­eta­bles to­gether, but ei­ther fruits or veg­eta­bles might make a com­pa­rable anal­ogy to meat.

My point was mainly that it’s pos­si­ble to syn­the­sise very close analogues of an­i­mal prod­ucts from plants and it’s not much trou­ble to get them (Beyond Meat and Hamp­ton Creek Foods are state of the art, but stuff like Fry’s veg­e­tar­ian is wide­spread and easy to get). More data is needed for things like Soylent and Power Smooth­ies, al­though peo­ple have been liv­ing for months on them now I guess.

I’ve re­cently no­ticed that I’ve gone nearly a year with­out this (was go­ing to try a soylent recipe in­stead, and didn’t, and for­got to re­stock!), and have not suffered any ill effects.

Well, I would say you haven’t suffered any no­tice­able ill effects. You don’t ac­tu­ally know how healthy you would feel if you were an om­nivore so it’s hard to say that you have not suffered any ad­verse health effect.

I don’t re­mem­ber feel­ing or be­ing any more (or less) healthy when I was an om­nivore (I was one up un­til age 2004 (age 23)). But note that I’ve never reached an op­ti­mal level of phys­i­cal fit­ness as an adult—maybe one of these years I’ll stick to an ex­er­cise regime for long enough!

I think this kind of ar­gu­ment is in­ter­est­ing and im­por­tant, but of­ten rarely talked about.

I would be in­ter­ested if you or any­one else were to make a top level post on this is­sue, to elab­o­rate on your points and al­low broader dis­cus­sion. Failing that, does any­one have any links or book recom­men­da­tions that ar­gue things similar to this?

Thanks for post­ing this To­pher. When I was ve­gan, my diet was very similar to the one you de­scribed, and all in all I didn’t find it that difficult. You’ll no­tice the “was” in that sen­tence though—the thing that got me was eat­ing out or eat­ing so­cially with friends—I found it very difficult to main­tain a ve­gan diet then, and so I found my­self slip­ping. I’d be in­ter­ested in how you deal with this—do you stick to a ve­gan diet even when eat­ing out or go­ing to friends houses, and if so, how difficult do you find it?

My solu­tion for a while was to have a strict rule that I am en­tirely ve­gan in what I cook and by for my­self, and veg­e­tar­ian in other situ­a­tions—like eat­ing out—where be­ing ve­gan is very difficult or in­con­ve­nient. This worked pretty well for a while. It’s harder now be­cause I’m liv­ing in a house with peo­ple who fre­quently cook to­gether—which has a lot of benefits of saved time, money, and be­ing more en­joy­able and so­cia­ble—but aren’t ve­gan. So I’ve slipped back to just be­ing veg­e­tar­ian across the board, but I feel some­what un­com­fortable about it.

Cur­rently, I bee­mind (us­ing a Do Less goal) “non-ve­gan meals per week”. This has pro­vided the mild pos­i­tive pres­sure for me to choose to be ve­gan for most of my meals but al­low my­self to eat a few meals a week with friends with­out pay­ing a so­cial penalty.

For eat­ing out, it’s nearly always pos­si­ble to get a ve­gan ver­sion of a non-ve­gan dish, even when there isn’t any­thing ve­gan listed on the menu (e.g. pizza with­out cheese). How­ever, it does per­haps take a bit of effort/​prac­tice to get over the “I’m be­ing difficult” feel­ing—keep in mind that ve­g­anism is a pos­i­tive thing, not some­thing to feel guilty about. Failing that, chips and salad is a fal­lback op­tion :-) As for eat­ing at friends houses, I guess it’s similar: you have to feel com­fortable with re­quest­ing ve­gan food (or oth­er­wise limit­ing your op­tions). I’ve never been that into food, so these things don’t bother me that much.

For Ad­vanced Lazy Mode, prospec­tive ve­g­ans who are wary/​grossed out by Soylent could also try Power Smooth­ies, which re­quire only one ap­pli­ance (a blender) rather than two, taste quite good, and are some­what faster/​lower-effort than cook­ing things. You can sub­sti­tute the whey pro­tein in the recipes there for some kind of ve­gan pro­tein and have a com­pletely ve­gan meal.

Power Smooth­ies are grad­u­ally tak­ing over my house and have con­verted two formerly-skep­ti­cal room­mates so far, so I recom­mend try­ing one be­fore you de­cide that they prob­a­bly taste bad or some­thing.

I’m a veg­e­tar­ian and a pretty se­ri­ous ath­lete. I have a great re­la­tion­ship with my GP, have been tested for sev­eral dietary in­suffi­cien­cies that I now take sup­ple­ments for (iron, B12, zinc) and all is swell. I’m ac­tu­ally a med­i­cal stu­dent and have looked into the liter­a­ture on veg­e­tar­ian diets and can’t see any prob­lem with them as long as those sup­ple­ments are taken.

I ac­cept eth­i­cal ar­gu­ments for ve­g­anism, HOWEVER given the amount of ex­er­cise I do I’d love ad­vice from any­one on here how to get enough pro­tein as a ve­gan! Right now most of my pro­tein comes from eggs and whey-based pro­tein pow­der and I ab­solutely could not give these up. If some­one can solve this for me you’ve got your­self a new ve­gan!

Ac­cord­ing to Google, oats have more pro­tein than eggs by weight (17% vs. 13%), and por­ridge is quick and easy to make in the microwave. There are also lots of ve­gan pro­tein pow­ders. Maybe try soy, as pea doesn’t taste very nice.

Silk ad­ver­tises it­self as “50% more cal­cium than dairy milk”, so I’d say yes. Most brands of soymilk I’ve seen have at least as much cal­cium as dairy milk. But I don’t know if your body ab­sorbs it as read­ily from soymilk as from dairy milk.

Th­ese prod­ucts aren’t ve­gan, since they con­tain whey, but I’ll note that Op­ti­mum Nutri­tion rou­tinely puts out very good pow­ders. I’d recom­mend try­ing them first. Don’t worry too much about find­ing the “best” pow­der in a nu­tri­tional sense; most can­di­dates are likely to be so similar that it won’t re­ally mat­ter (es­pe­cially since nu­tri­tion la­bels usu­ally aren’t quite 100% ac­cu­rate).

I’ve come to think pro­tein is some­what over-rated as a con­cern for ve­g­ans. Un­less you’re try­ing to be a body builder, I think it’s pretty easy to get enough pro­tein through the sources men­tioned in the OP (ce­re­als and legumes are com­pli­men­tary in terms of their amino acid con­tent).

As long as you aren’t feel­ing hun­gry most of the time, you’re prob­a­bly get­ting enough pro­tein. So I would say it doesn’t re­ally take any ex­tra effort. e.g. If all you eat was bread, you’d be get­ting enough pro­tein. I think most peo­ple in the west prob­a­bly eat more pro­tein than they need.

So do you have that diet plan? Please link.

Now that GiveWell’s done a re­search re­view on the carbs hy­poth­e­sis, you could edit this ar­ti­cle to refer­ence it since I bet a lot of EAs would find this more cred­ible than most other forms of ev­i­dence you could cite.